Glass Shard
by Meriko
Summary: During the years that Vincent slept in his coffin, Lucrecia lived through a nightmare of her own. Status: Complete.
1. Part I - Genesis

** Chapter 1: Genesis **

"And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." Genesis 3:15

* * * * *

She was burning up.

The fever was a live thing, crawling under her skin, tearing through her veins, pulsing behind her eyes. No matter how she lay, the fever was always pounding through her head, throbbing through every cell in her body as if it were trying to grow, to expand beyond the boundaries of her flesh. Sweat plastered long tendrils of chestnut hair to her face, each laboring breath that she sucked in pulling tickling strands across her lips, and each gasping breath that she let out hot and dry and always tasting of _it_.

_I hate you, I hate you, you horrible THING! You can't have him I won't let you he's mine and I won't let you touch him!_

My husband, my lover, my son...my husband, my lover, my son...

It, Jenova, her husband's one true passion and love, the creature to which her son had been sacrificed. She had always refused to refer to the alien as "she" or "her" or "Jenova." It was always "it" or "the specimen"...something impersonal and inferior...some small, meaningless way in which she denied the creature's place in their lives. Their lives...which had once been their shared life, their partnership, their marriage...until the specimen had been found. And oh how excited they had been. Passion and fervor had coursed in their veins as the fever now ravaged through hers. Sleepless nights, endless days, all spent in pursuit of the creature that had waited, had bided its time, sleeping away the years until its day should come anew. Logical experiments carried out with the utmost precision and care, new ideas coming upon them in crazy floods and lightning strikes of inspiration and intuition, theories and suppositions and pure wonder at the treasure chest of knowledge this alien symbolized for them.

Pandora's box.

Lucrecia moaned as a sudden, shivering chill grasped her body, the fever-dreams of her past disappearing from her mind's eye like a mist burned away by the sun. Her spine arched against the pain and she rolled onto her back, the back of her head supporting her upper body over the icy floor she lay upon, hands clenched into tight fists...mute and helpless gesture of defiance. But there was no fighting the fever, the pain...it. There had been a child in her womb, and that child had been the magnet to which the cells and mako were drawn to...but the child was gone and the cells were preying upon her body now, ravenous and cruel. The cells were a sentient, starving army bent on taking over her body, seeking destruction rather than domination, for it had no further use for this discarded husk. Lucrecia had served her purpose.

The spasm passed for the moment, and the woman seemed to crumple bonelessly against the frozen ground, her sweat-drenched hair freezing to the ice on which she lay. How long? How long had she been lying there, lost and lonely in this barren, ice-bound cave?

* * * * *

_A cave...a cave! God I'm so tired, I just want to die, let me die let me sleep let me rest. A cave, a cave...waterfall and rocks and icy cold...so cold...just let me rest a while, sleep a while, just let me die. I'm so tired, so tired of this pain, this horrible pain...let me die don't let that thing do this to me let me die..._

She dragged her aching feet across the uneven terrain, days past caring about the wear on her shoes, no longer feeling the blisters form and rise and burst on her feet, not even able to remember anymore where she was running to. South? South of Nibelheim...but the river blocked her way...follow the river, follow the river...day after pain-filled day. One shoe jarred against a rock and the woman crashed to her hands and knees, sharp pebbles and grit tearing at her soft skin, the dry ground underneath drinking greedily at the blood offering thus produced. A soft cry of pain wrenched its way out of her throat, muffled and subdued out of habit...swallow the pain, swallow it down like the medicines, like the potions, like the serums. Don't cry out loud, don't let out any complaints, any doubts, and don't throw up any food either, because you're eating for two, now.

But she wasn't...not anymore. Her belly no longer swelled out before her, and the missing weight now unbalanced her as much as the bulk of the child had a month ago. The tattered fabric of her lab coat fell smooth and straight down her stomach, hiding the sloppy stitches - it didn't need to be pretty, she was going to die anyway, he had said - and the hideous, unnatural scar tissue that grew thicker with each passing day. Hazy blue and glaring purple ropes of tissue that pushed and strained at the dead black stitches imbedded in her body...alien flesh that was creeping over her, taking her over, changing her, replacing her, eating her away...

Lucrecia sobbed aloud, for there was no one to hide her pain from any longer. One bloodied hand remained trembling on the rocky soil, supporting her as she sat and sobbed and slowly continued on her journey towards Becoming something different, something else. The thick, leather-bound book and monstrous pistol she'd been cradling - as if they were her missing child - has spilled onto the ground before her, and she reached out her free hand towards them. The only items she'd carried away with her...the only two items she'd kept hidden, kept secret, kept away from her husband...not counting the pain and doubt and fear, of course. The book she'd discovered and read and stolen and hidden...unable to believe that it was her husband's...unwilling to believe that he had thought up such a horrific experiment, much less carried it out against her lover. And the gun...the pistol, the weapon, the elegant and deadly steel. A gift, and what a gift. An instrument of death for the man who symbolized the final, fatal wound in her marriage. A present to be opened and who knew what use it might be put to?

_Come find me, Vincent...come find me, please. He said you were dead but I saw...I saw the instruments, the blood, the chemicals and syringes and God oh God all that blood. The gurney where I'd given birth and even more blood than what I'd spilled, the sutures, the blood-soaked gauze, the IVs and the specimens and the blood, all that blood, all of your blood, Vincent. You're alive, you're alive, I know you are...he wouldn't go through all of that horror that experimenting that creation and then let you die..._

* * * * *

Her body still one writhing, pulsing scream of pain, Lucrecia had pushed herself off of the bloodstained cot that had been put together upstairs in the mansion, barely hearing the crash of the frame against the floor over the roar of her blood in her ears. The pain that centered itself in her womb was no match for the anguish of her triple-betrayal. Her husband, her lover, her son...she'd given all of herself to each in turn and had received only loneliness for love, abandonment for adoration, and death for devotion. Trembling from all her hurts, and faltering with each step, yet somehow she'd managed to wrap a coat around her shivering frame, slip shoes onto her feet, and take away with her one of her husband's secrets and one of her own.

She no longer had a son, but she still had her life, despite all predictions that morning would find her body cold and stiff on the cot. She would run, she would hide, she would bide her time as patiently as that thing in the glorified fish tank that her husband worshipped. And someday she would reclaim her son but for now...run, hide, and wait. She no longer had a lover, but she knew, she knew that he was yet alive somewhere. She would take the gun she'd secretly commissioned for him and find him and give it to him and who knew what then? Perhaps a bullet for her husband. Her husband, the husband who had used her and left her to die without a backwards glance as he stole her son away and left her to listen to her lover's screams drift up from the basement as she lay sobbing on the cot, bound to the sticky canvas as much by the drugs in her bloodstream as by the pain in her heart.

Her husband...who'd written in proud detail all of the inhuman triumphs of his mind and talented hands. The ultimate experiment in revenge, oh what a dedicated scientist, what a triumphant genius this husband of hers. Tearing her unhealed wounds with every step, she'd made her trip down the wooden spiral of stairs, dripping blood and tears all the way down to her own level of hell. And for her pains, for her trip fueled by desperation and despair and a vague hope that she might at least die by his side...she had found only evidence, and no body. No Vincent, no Turk, no lover...only her lover's blood everywhere and the proof of her husband's madness scattered every which way across the nightmarish laboratory and the book which had been her husband's most recent brainchild.

And oh how she'd hated. At that moment the hate had risen up in her just like love and need had overflowed in the past. It had consumed her every fiber in one raging burst of flame and for that moment she had stood up straight and tall and terrible, the pain forgotten, the wounds forgotten, with only one thought in her mind and one goal in her life and one passion in her heart...to hate. But the moment had passed, the hastily-stitched cuts in her body seeping blood and unnamable fluids and searing hot pain. The moment had passed and she'd bent nearly double, hugging her arms across her deflated stomach as if the pain were a bubble that she could hold back, hold down, hold in. Dizzy with blood loss and exhaustion and a strangeness in her body that she couldn't define, she flung out one arm towards a table, suddenly certain that she would black out then and there, crashing forward to crack open her skull on the stone floor. Dead woman...no, discarded incubator, no longer functional now that it was no longer needed...piddling detail that they would find it in the basement rather than on the cot upstairs. Either way, done deal...sweep it up with the rest of the shattered remains of her life.

_No!_

So she'd slapped one arm down onto the nearby table, knocking beakers and jars and trays full of scalpels onto the floor in a symphony of crashes that trailed off into small tinklings of broken glass. One hand on the table, one hand still clutching her throbbing, leaking, unfamiliar stomach...and head hanging down like a dog's underneath a pounding sun, breath coming in small, gasping sobs and eyes staring fixedly at the floor because she didn't have the mental resources at the moment to look around. Shattered jars reflected lamplight back at her, their once-carefully preserved contents spilled out in puddles of noxious liquid, gracefully floating forms now grotesquely weighted down by gravity and age. Specimens and failed experiments, pieces and parts and pathetic remnants now lay together on the floor amidst their broken prisons, they themselves tattered and torn and falling to pieces.

Like her life. This was her life. She was a glass jar and they'd put a specimen inside of her...but now the specimen was gone and so they'd simply thrown the jar to the floor because they were done with her, they didn't need her anymore, she'd become useless. The dizziness and the threat of fainting faded slightly, and Lucrecia reached down towards the floor and picked up one of the curved, glinting pieces with one hand. This was what they'd done to her. A small spark of anger flared up again, and pale fingers clenched convulsively around the glass shard in her hands. The pain that shot up her hand to her elbow startled her, as if she'd thought that her capacity for pain had been reached long ago, and she opened her fingers to let the now-bloodied glass slip back to the floor to shatter yet again into smaller, more slender pieces. Brilliant diamond daggers...no more than three inches long, some of them even smaller...but oh so deadly if they were applied correctly. This was her life. This was _her_. They'd thrown the jar to the floor because they didn't need it anymore but she wasn't done with _them_. She was a discarded container and now she wasn't...she was broken and useless but sharp and deadly and she _hated_ and she would cut him, cut _it_, she would cut them deep.

And then her eyes fell upon the book on the table.

* * * * *

_Oh this terrible book, this God-awful book, my Vincent, come find me, come find me, please. I wasn't there for you and you weren't there for me but I know, I know what he did to you. It's here, it's in here every sick detail and every demonic hope that he had for his experiments, everything he hoped to do to you. Regeneration and deconstruction and transformation, oh my God was I ever in love was he ever human? Come find me, Vincent, come find me, please so I can show you, so you can know, so maybe you can fight this thing, this THING he's put inside you like I couldn't fight what was inside me._

And the thing that was inside of her was now on the outside of her as well. She could no longer pretend that the fact that she was still alive was a mercy from God, or a medical miracle...the miracle belonged to the Goddess in the Glass. And the stigmata that marked her was the bruise-colored flesh that roped along her body, tendrils and vines and fingers that crept over her skin and claimed her as captured territory. She had crawled her way up out of the basement with the book in her hands, dragged her body out of the mansion with the gun lying against the book in her arms, and then she'd walked and fallen and crawled and stumbled on day after day, night after night. She had cried and dreamed and kept walking and walking...and then the fever had begun to burn in her body. Some scientist, some biologist, some doctor...she hadn't even thought of bringing any healing potions with her despite all her injuries, her wounds. She was a scientist, a biologist, a doctor...she could handle the sight of wounds and stitches and infected flesh. But when she'd clawed away her clothing to look for the red, swollen scars and burning skin of an infection what she'd seen had made her scream. She'd run away from the mansion but the monster had come with her.

_A cave...a cave!_

She was so tired, God, how tired. She'd traveled for so many miles, for so many days, only to discover that she'd killed herself the day she'd let him inject those cells into her body. For the experiment, for the baby, for everything they could learn, they could create, they could do. For him...for he who had used her as a specimen jar and then thrown her to the ground to shatter. And she no longer felt sharp and deadly and glittering bright...she was just so tired, she just wanted to rest, to sleep, to die. For even if she could strike out...how to strike out at the cancerous entity growing in her own body?

* * * * *

Lucrecia gave a small, broken whimper as she stared with glassy, blind eyes across the icy floor to the glowing entrance of the cavern, seeing visions of herself in her fever-fogged mind. She had stumbled inside, the fever beginning to light up her entire body, and had collapsed here in the back on her way towards the strange, glittering altar that had seemed to beckon to her. The book...the book and the gun had been so heavy, so very heavy, but somehow she'd stubbornly clung to the idea that it would be...wrong, somehow, to simply place them on the ground. And so when she'd spied the ice-bound dais...hazy logic had spurred her shaking legs towards the icy table. But she hadn't reached it. Five feet away from her goal her limbs had finally given one last tremble and collapsed. And since then...feverish visions, nightmares that haunted her sleep, stark moments of lucidity like cold water thrown over her gasping mind. How long? How long had she been lying there?

Her mind struggled with the question and the concept it symbolized. Time...there was time, she knew it, had known it once, and was sure it still existed. But how long had she been lying there? This was the question her mind returned to every time she drifted up out of a dream, a vision, a nightmare. And no answers ever came...there was only snatches of memories marking time long past, and a fleeting remembrance of the light at the mouth of the cavern dimming and fading and blazing bright again. Morning and evenings that passed by the cave's entrance as time stood still within for the deadly, dying glass shard that Hojo had thrown away.

_I'm dying. I'm dying. He took my baby and left me the monster and I'm that glass jar lying broken on the floor and I'm dying. I'm going to die here alone in this cave on this floor with this fever burning me up and those cells eating my body and that THING's voice in my head. Oh God I'm so tired so hot I'm burning I'm dying..._

Flat on her back in the middle of her cold blue cave, Lucrecia slipped away once more into her nightmares.


	2. Part II - Exodus

** Chapter 2: Lamentations **

"Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are upon her cheeks. Among all her lovers there is none to comfort her. All her friends have betrayed her; they have become her enemies." Lamentations 1:2

* * * * *

She was burning up.

Her eyes felt like swollen, burning materia orbs, rolling restlessly behind her lids as if seeking to escape her head. Slowly, as if they were weighted down with rocks, she dragged her eyelids open, wincing at the harsh, fuzzy brightness of the ice-bound walls arching around her. Her neck creaked painfully as she turned her head to avoid the lights that shot spears of pain through her head, but the light was everywhere...a hazy, indistinct mosaic of white. Flailing one arm clumsily and crying out at the muscle spasms that followed, she rolled over onto her side, pressing her face into the hard ice beneath her. Her flushed, fevered face melted the surface of the ice somewhat, turning the floor into a glassy mirror, and when she was finally able to focus her eyes onto the reflection of her face, she screamed with all the strength and breath left in her body.

* * * * *

The pale form was hunched over slightly in the clear liquid, but the impression that the specimen gave was that of a figure standing tall and terrible over the entire Planet. Or at least, that was how Lucrecia saw it. Glittering, _alive_ brown eyes moved carefully over what they'd all thought was a dead creature, noting every minute detail with all the jealous precision of a woman searching her husband's collar for lipstick stains. And that wasn't too far off of the mark, really. There was a husband involved, and of course a wife...but the other woman wasn't a woman, not really. It. Pale pink lips curled slightly in disdain as Lucrecia's eyes continued their careful catalogue of the form suspended in the glass tank before her. The figure had a woman's shape, a woman's name, and a woman's fascinating hold on at least one man in the mansion...but it was only a creature, a specimen, a _thing_. And this was what Lucrecia kept repeating to herself as she stared down the millennia-old alien that was stealing her husband from out of her arms, her heart, her life.

Almost as an afterthought, instead of with the care and precision she usually lavished on her work, she visually confirmed the items on her checklist with all the glazed boredom of familiar routine. Small black tick marks appeared under the jabbing, stabbing tip of her pen as she went down the list attached to the clipboard in the crook of her left arm. Rows of dials, valves and coils of tubing that snaked in and out of the circular tank, filters humming quietly nearby - not too far away that the length of pipes would decrease efficiency and flow, but not too close that random sparks might endanger their precious specimen - heaters, coolers, every single technology available to ensure that this find of a lifetime, a century, of a millennia would not come to harm. Cool and casual in her shirt, slacks, and lab coat, the scientist on the current rotation dutifully went over her clipboard, jotting down numbers and writing observations down in her neat, slanted handwriting.

_He loved my writing. Said it was a reflection of my orderly mind. My orderly mind. What goes through this thing's orderly mind? Nothing but chemicals, with maybe bits and pieces of whatever passes for an alien's brain floating free in between where the ears should be. He used to laugh at me for organizing my grocery lists by the appropriate aisle, he used to tease me by hiding one of the colored pens I used to separate my different notes, he used to NOTICE these things. And now, now it's facts and theories and experiments and procedures and all of his hundred thousand thoughts on this...this...specimen. The planets revolve around this tank, not the sun._

Finished with her mandatory maintenance, she tucked her pen back into her shirt pocket and crossed her arms over her clipboard, never taking her eyes off of the biological statue before her. Statue...more like an idol or god...the Goddess in the Glass that her husband worshipped. But he hadn't always. At first, it had been curiosity fueled on rumors. Nothing more than speculative talk over dinner or a pensive, thoughtful mood when the lab was slow. And then on the heels of discovery came an excitement that they had both shared in equal measure. He had seen his career written in diamonds in the sky, and she had been top full of loving support and pride. And oh how they'd come together then, spending every waking moment with their heads knocking together over charts and readouts and notes, flying high on adrenaline and ambition. Days and weeks and months spent always on the brink of discovery, looking out over the edge at the endless horizon without ever seeing the yawning chasm that waited beneath them.

But now...now it was adoration. From excitement over the possibilities to an actual worship of what he saw as the source of his future successes, from scientific observations to reverent gazes, from gratitude to obsession. At least from him. Lucrecia did not worship this goddess. But she wouldn't admit to jealousy or hatred either, at least not yet. That would be an acknowledgement that this specimen was worthy of such fierce emotions, that it was a true adversary, that it was a threat. She was no superstitious ninny, carrying good luck charms and muttering incantations when afraid, but she still held to the subconscious idea that an evil named was an evil empowered. And just as she stubbornly, perhaps childishly refused to refer to the specimen by name or feminine pronoun, so she refused to admit that her husband no longer loved her nor wanted her. But he needed her...he needed her still. He needed her sharp mind, her long experience working by his side on his team for his dreams...he needed the tiny collection of cells doubling and dividing within her womb.

For his experiments...for his dreams...and ultimately, as a sacrifice to the Goddess.

* * * * *

The blurry, wavering face that looked up at her from the icy floor was the one she'd learned to hate, to be jealous of, to want to smash with her fists...how long ago? How long had she been lying here, fading in and out of dreams as her body was taken over? She sobbed and trembled at the face leering up at her, and tangled locks of hair fell down and marred the reflection, breaking the illusion of an alien trapped within the ice. Not an alien...just a reflection of a pale woman's face...with alien eyes. The very same eyes that had sneered down at her through the glass wall of the specimen tank now gazed up at her from the mirrored surface of the ice. The cave was bright, so bright, because the cells waging war with her body had set up camp in her eyes, the windows to her lost soul. Under Lucrecia's corpse-white eyelids lay deep blue orbs, dark shadows swirling in their depths like monsters waiting at the bottom of the ocean. And it was bright, so blindingly bright in the cave because she could no longer control how much light struck her retinas. So she clenched shut her lids, gritting her teeth as tightly as she could against the never ending fevers and chills, the lucid portion of her mind begging whatever higher power might be listening for sleep, for rest, for death...again. She knew somehow that she'd been sleeping and waking and sleeping again and again, over and over...

But for how long? How long had she been lying there, changing and dreaming and never remembering anything when she awoke except for memories from before this icy prison? Midgar, Junon, Costa del Sol, Nibelheim...her parents, her schoolmates, her husband and...it. It, the alien, the specimen...the thing which was taking over her body, which had sprouted tendrils of alien flesh over her belly out of the wounds left from the hideous birthing process of its scion. Not her son anymore...now the scion of that alien creature. And her husband, too...no longer her husband...now the High Priest of the Goddess in the Glass. And her lover...where was he? Lying, dying in some cave like she was, his body slowly giving ground to the army of murderous cells invading his body? Or was it using him for some furtherance of its plan, like it was using her son?

The thought of her child given up to whatever horrors had hatched in her husband's mind caused a wrenching pain far greater than that caused by her fever spasms, and Lucrecia curled her body into a fetal position in mute protest. Ah, bitter irony. What was she doing? Trying to take his place in the crucible of his father's madness? Lucrecia moaned, all of her muscles clenching tight as she held her empty arms to her chest and wept bitter tears onto the ground.

_Sephiroth, Sephiroth...I never even got to hold you, my son, my child, my baby._

* * * * *

She lay on the gurney, cold steel leeching the warmth from her body instead of warming to her touch. How much blood had she lost that she couldn't even maintain her body heat any longer? Pain-glazed eyes rolled in their sockets, roving around and hardly seeing the dark, dank room she lay bleeding in. Several lamps hung over her, dull and hazy suns watching impassively over her labor. There had been an IV stand as well, replacing the fluids that were rushing from her in a crimson torrent, but the needle had been slipped from her arm just now...why had they done that? She needed that IV, she needed the plasma...she might be half out of her mind but some part of her mind still logically noted that it would be a pity to die of simple hypotension and exsanguination after surviving nine months of more radiation and experimental drugs than anyone had ever seen before. Nine months. Nine months of daily injections that burned her veins and caused her jaw to cramp shut. Nine months of increasing doses of mako radiation that had her bowed over the sink, praying that she wouldn't throw up because then she'd have to eat more anyway to feed the baby.

_My baby! Where's my baby?!_

Her body jerked upwards of its own accord before she'd even finished her frantic thought, but thick straps held her forearms down on the gurney, their mates at the far end of the steel surface binding her ankles, one to a corner. The sudden movement sent lightning bolts of fresh pain jolting up and down her spine, splintering her control and reducing her to a trembling, whimpering ghost. She slammed shut her eyes and clenched her teeth until her jaw ached as much as the rest of her exhausted body, willing the pain to recede, to subside, to leave her alone please God. Gradually the waves of nausea and bone-deep hurt retreated, and she became aware of her surroundings once more, having risen out of the fogs that drugs and pain had driven her into. Straining weakly against the straps that bound her to the cold table, she writhed and wormed her way into a semi-sitting position, propping herself up on her elbows as best she could without dislocating her limbs. Blurry eyes swept over the handful of figures floating around the room in identical surgical gowns stained all over with myriad gory colors...wine dark blood, ichor green, nameless variations of yellow and orange and dead-flesh purple. Turning her face away from the gruesome shades that ignored her - was she the ghost or were they? - Lucrecia glanced down at her own body, half-hidden in a thin surgical gown, and would have screamed if she'd been able to find the air to do so.

The pale stomach that had gone from soft, smooth curve to a swollen pearl in the months past was now nearly unrecognizable as human flesh. Breeding hosts to be immediately discarded had been given caesarian sections with more precision than this. There had been autopsied bodies stitched together with more care than this. The ragged tears and cuts that were haphazardly held together with irregularly placed knots of thick, black surgical thread were as much of a shock as if she'd looked up to find another person's head resting on her husband's shoulders...this wasn't his work. Obsessed, insane, delusional, cruel...however he had changed, his need for order, precision, and exactitude were still with him.

_Except when you disturbed him, when you dared to interrupt him, when you called his name while he was just standing there like a zombie staring at that specimen tank. Except when he sinks into those trances, when he loses himself, when he's just plain old thinking. Orderly, precise, and exact except when he's busy, when he's distracted, when he's communing with his Goddess..._

The messy surgery, the sloppy clean up...this wasn't her husband's work, her husband's mind, her husband's skills and experience and methodology. It was as startling as if she'd looked up from the gurney to find the Goddess holding the scalpel instead of her husband. Her peripheral vision - blurred and fogged by pain and drugs - noted a bloodstained figure approach, and she dragged her eyes from her bloody, broken body, half-expecting to see that hateful, pale blue and purple figure looming over her, dripping with her own blood. But instead it was her husband, nodding to himself over something with his back turned to her, and Lucrecia cried out to him in a voice as ragged and torn as her flesh.

_"What did you do to me?!"_ she sobbed, and only received a mildly curious, detached look over one shoulder in reply.

Still with his back to her, he glanced down to her exposed wounds, and then shrugged and said, "It doesn't need to be pretty. You're going to die anyway." She gazed blankly at him, mind reeling at the chilling reply. He turned then, and she finally saw what he was holding in his arms...her child. The sight of the small, squirming bundle seemed to act as a catalyst upon her senses. Suddenly her entire being was focused on the baby in her husband's arms. The pain was forgotten, the cruel words pushed aside, and she filled her eyes with the delicate curve of the infant's head, straining her ears to hear every whimpering cry he made, hands straining at her bonds as she longed to cradle her son to her breast.

Her fingers opening and closing convulsively as they remained strapped to the gurney, Lucrecia cried out softly for her child. Her husband ignored her entirely, simply standing by her side and studying the infant with a blank expression on his face. Frustration warring with the utter longing in her heart, Lucrecia spat out, "Let me go! I want to hold him! He's my son; let me hold him!"

Her ferocious begging was met with a completely emotionless look and the cool response, "I think not." She gaped at him incredulously? He thought not? He thought not _what?!_

"What are you talking about?" she gasped out. "You can't keep him from me; he's _mine!_" she reiterated, and then continued to stare up at her husband in disbelief, which deepened into a shocked realization at his next words.

"This isn't your child," Hojo explained evenly, as if trying to teach a rather slow child a simple mathematical equation. "Sephiroth was and is ours, never yours. Now that this specimen has been safely delivered, we no longer need you."

Her mind reeled with all of the implications, but as he turned and walked away - _with my child my baby bring him back to me he's MINE!_ - all thoughts ceased and she went quite simply and wonderfully insane. Hojo continued to walk steadily away with the infant held securely in his arms, face blank and cool as if he wasn't even registering his wife's mad screams chasing him down the hallway.

_"GIVE HIM TO ME HE'S MINE YOU BASTARD YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME GIVE ME MY BABY HE'S MINE HE'S MINE HE'S MINE HE'S MINE..."_

* * * * *

Clenching shut her alien eyes, Lucrecia sobbed with the remembered pain and anger and sheer lightning-bright madness that overcame her after the hours of pain and suffering...no, not hours...months. Months of anguish only to finally know at the eleventh hour that the man you thought was your husband was actually your enemy in human guise. To have your firstborn raped from your body and laid on the sacrificial altar without ever holding him. To find that you'd been used by your husband and his deity as an incubator to create a specimen to be used in their own plots and plans...your child, your baby, your only son...their specimen.

He hadn't even called the baby his son, rather referring to the infant as "this specimen." He'd named the child Sephiroth - _where had he thought that up?!_ - but it was with the same tone and inflection he used when asking her to bring this or that file or specimen or book to him. XJ-7 didn't survive the transformation. The most recent batches of aero-dragons are ready for radiation treatments. The specimen has been safely delivered. The specimen, the specimen...how long had he been referring to their child as if he were some mutated monster floating in amber-hued preservative? The child, the boy, their son, HIM...Hojo had said, "it" much like she herself refused to assign gender to the Jenova specimen. But he hadn't always...had he?

* * * * *

She ground her teeth together, focusing on the dry, slip-sliding feeling of her molars rubbing against each other, concentrating on the way the armrest of the chair felt underneath the death-grip of her fingers, listening intently to the strained quality of the barely-controlled breaths she was drawing in and out. Lifting her head as if it weighed fifty pounds, dragging her eyes up over the bulge of her five months gone womb, she counted all of the books lined up like SOLDIERS in the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves across the room from where she sat. She mentally rattled off the entire periodic table of elements, listing symbols and atomic weights by rote. She tried to focus. She tried to concentrate. She tried not to feel the serum oozing through the IV in her arm and burning holes through her circulatory system. And with increasing weariness, she kept wondering how she'd allowed the experiment to go so far and for so long. She also tried to figure out where her husband had gone to, leaving her at the mercy of this strange man who wore her husband's face but stared at her with strange eyes, who spoke to her with her husband's voice but said strange things.

She was tired. She was sick to death of the weekly radiation treatments, the IV drips every Tuesday and Friday, and the thrice-daily injections. She was exhausted from the lack of sleep that resulted from a combination of nausea, anxiety, and nightmares. And she was desperately afraid that her life was now entirely out of control. Or rather, out of _her_ control and into the control of someone she no longer knew nor trusted.

Who, what, when, where, and why? As the IV continued to empty the thick, burning serum into her veins, Lucrecia leaned her head back against the hard wooden back of the chair and wondered wearily at her life. Who had her husband become? What was going to happen to her child? When would this nightmare end? Where was her life leading? And why oh why in the world had she ever agreed to this experiment?

When she'd first discovered her pregnancy, her immediate reaction had been one of dismay, followed by a quickly stamped-down pang of guilt. Surely he would see this as an interruption, an obstacle, a hindrance to their glorious plans for the newly discovered alien specimen. Nervously chafing her hands, she'd approached him with the news, expecting disappointment or blame, perhaps even for him to ask her how she'd let this happen when they were so very busy. But he hadn't, not at all. Instead, there had been a surprised look, a heavy pause, and then a careful smile and laughing congratulations to themselves. And she'd been so relieved and happy that she hadn't really noticed the speculative look on his face as he rested his eyes on her still-flat stomach. She had been so engrossed in the joy she hadn't allowed herself that she hadn't recognized the thin-lipped smile as the same one he used when speaking to the President, or to his direct supervisor...his politician's smile, his crocodile smile, his I'm-thinking-of-something-you-won't-like smile.

And oh, she had not liked it at all. But every protest that she'd made against the experiment had been met with persuasive reasons and glorious possibilities, and his reproachful tone...well, she was just being a nervous, un-supportive little woman. How could she ignore all of the potential, the scope, the sheer vastness of the future that lay in her hands? How could she deny their child this wonderful opportunity? How could she turn against her husband, her partner, the love of her life just when destiny seemed within his grasp? He had appealed to her scientist's intellect and curiosity, he had soothed her mother's instinct, and finally, he had laid a heavy burden of guilt on her eager-to-please nature.

And so here she was, bound to this uncomfortable chair by her convictions and promises as firmly as if they'd been ropes and shackles. But under the weight of the changes occurring in her husband...changes happening as smoothly and insidiously as the ones turning her body into a ripening fruit...those convictions were crumbling. Who was he now? How had this happened? And why? As the IV continued its slow bleeding into her veins, she turned her mind into the recent past as was her new habit whenever she found herself alone and unattended...as if afraid to even wonder, to dare to think thoughts against him when he was there. But now he was so rarely there...

All day, every day, every evening and sometimes at night...in the lab. If he had been hard at work she would have not worried so much. Simply encouraged him to sleep more, not really expecting him to do so of course, and taking meals down to him at regular intervals. But whenever she did glance up from her own desk, or creep downstairs in the dark of night, she would usually find him standing in front of the glass cylinder in which his pride and joy loomed all pale and ghostly. And as the time he spent thus contemplating the specimen increased...so of course his time spent with his wife dwindled. And so it was perhaps not surprising that Lucrecia didn't notice the signs, the changes, the difference...just as you don't notice the slowly gathering clouds until the ominous dark mass above you crackles suddenly with lightning and thunder. Just before the hair on your neck rises and the acrid blood-metal-electricity smell hits your nose and you know you're about to be hit by a firebolt from the sky.

She didn't notice the gradual transition in his attitude from expectant father to expectant scientist until the pregnancy and experiment were so far along that there was really nowhere else to go except for forward. She didn't begin keeping track of his hours until the third morning in a row that she'd awoken alone. And she hadn't realized how long it had been that she'd received any affection from her husband until she found herself seeking that precious gift from another man. Changes...so many changes in her life all at once. Her first child had been slowly becoming her husband's special project. Her husband had been slowly transferring his adoration from her to the ancient specimen in the basement. And her heart...alone, confused, and starving, had slowly turned from her husband to her guardian.

Vincent. Vincent Valentine. Turk, assassin, and one of three hired guns sent to guard the scientists and their work in far-off Nibelheim. His team had watched over the members of the Jenova Project with seeming indifference; a coolness, a distance that had kept them from being obtrusive...indeed, sometimes she'd forgotten that they were there at all. But one of the blue-suited epitomes of deadly efficiency had gradually drawn near, become her shadow, become her guardian...and it was him who she'd unconsciously - at first - charged with her safety, her heart, and later on, her son.

* * * * *

The child growing in her womb was _hers_, it was _theirs_, it was their _child_! Had been, at least. She sat at the low table occupying one side of the inn's upper suite, slowly running her hand over the swollen curve of her stomach over and over again...up, down, up, down, stroking her belly as if trying to soothe the child that slept so restlessly within, as if he knew that it was almost time to be born, and was impatient. Every passing month, every passing week, every single unendurably long day that she lived through seemed to bring with it another element of...difference. Of some strange sensation of being detached from the child in her womb, of being separate, apart. Which was ridiculous, of course...what closer bond could there be than mother and child, especially in the precious months when the two were literally contained in one body? Yet there it was...the feeling. The feeling of being nothing more than a container, an incubator, a specimen tank. The feeling that she was merely housing another's child. But whose?

Ah, well...his, and his Goddess' of course.

But no, this was _her_ child and she would not give it up. Not just hers..._theirs_. Created with what might have been the last of their love, a last memento of what had been a wonderful marriage. She had lost her husband - she admitted it now - and she had given up a great deal of her life, but she would not give up her child to the Purpose of that disgusting, decaying organism over in the mansion. And what could a weakened, nine-months pregnant woman accomplish against the will of her mad genius husband? Plenty, if said pregnant woman had a trained assassin willing to risk his life for hers.

_I love you, I'll do anything for you, I swear it._

She leaned her head back against the back of her wooden seat, closing her eyes as she replayed those words spoken in a voice that was warm and harsh, soft and deadly all at once. Oh, Vincent...Vincent, her lover, her savior, her last hope. Her silent shadow, her watchful guard, her oh so willing haven from the bitter loneliness and jealousy that had threatened to completely undo her. Such a paradox, this dark man with the dark eyes and the dark past and even darker future...he was an angel. She'd met him with all the subconscious superiority of a scientist for someone who was not, and had been ashamed of her preconceived notions within a minute. A killer, a hired thug...she'd expected cold, flat eyes and an unintelligent demeanor...someone only and always suited for taking orders and mindless destruction. What she'd discovered was instead a gentle, assessing gaze and a quick mind. A firm handshake, simple nod and murmured "pleased to meet you" later, she'd found herself thinking that this was the sort of man she'd feel comfortable having stand guard just outside her bedroom door. Someone trustworthy, despite the gun peeping from his jacket. Someone comforting, despite his deadly occupation. Someone whose simple presence calmed her somehow, in some way, for some strange reason.

Had she loved him? Yes. Had she ever loved him in the way that he deserved? No. Lucrecia stilled the hand on her stomach for a moment to turn her mind more fully to the man now occupying the better half of her heart. The man into whose hands she had entrusted her future. Vincent...Vincent Valentine...he who, despite the cruelties that life committed against him, could still forgive her and love her so wholly and purely despite her desperate, confused betrayal.

_I have to go back to him, Vincent...I can't explain why because I honestly don't know. It's just...he needs me now and I need to be there for him. The move, the experiments...just everything that's going on...it's changed him somehow and sometimes it's like he's...so lost, somehow. I'm sorry, Vincent...I'm so sorry. Please understand..._

He hadn't understood - truth be told, neither had she - but he'd nodded all the same, dark eyes sharp with pain and ever-gentle hands trembling slightly against hers. One last handclasp before he let her go...not that he'd ever really had a strong grasp on her. He'd held her to his body and his heart with an almost tentative gentleness, as if she were a butterfly or delicate ornament. He had never been demanding of her time, had never argued the secrecy she'd wrapped their relationship in...and hadn't murmured one word of protest when she'd told him that it was over. Only...his hands had shot out to grasp her fingers in his, in a wordless plea. And after her simple, cruel explanation, he'd leaned forward as if to kiss her - goodbye, perhaps - and had stopped mere millimeters away from her lips. She could still remember his soft breaths whispering over her face, the warmth of his body like a comforting blanket around her. And she could still remember simply standing there like a statue, watching him watch her...so worked up over her husband that she'd been unable to react to her lover. Something like...recognition or remembrance flickered in the eyes locked onto hers - remembering that she'd just tossed him aside? - and with a barely audible sigh, he simply raised one hand to brush lightly against her cheek and walked away. The best shot in the Turks Force, and his hands had been trembling. She'd done that to him. She hadn't told him she loved him still, she hadn't begged his forgiveness, and she hadn't thanked him for rescuing her, for saving her, for being there when she needed to be needed. Oh, Lucrecia...ever the high and mighty scientist. You never knew what an angel you held in your arms and then threw him away when your wonderful, genius, scientist husband seemed to need you again. She and Hojo deserved each other more than they knew.

Deserved each other...but didn't want each other. Out of duty and a dusty love she'd returned to the husband she'd abandoned, only to find that the man she remembered no longer existed. There was just the empty shell...he talked, he walked, and he worked. But rather than an animated, passionate scientist...it was like watching a puppet on strings, dancing to a tune she couldn't hear. She could hate him, she could pity him, and she could despise him...but she couldn't love him anymore, and she certainly wasn't about to surrender her child to him and his obsession. Besides...here was the ages-old complaint. He didn't love her anymore.

But Vincent still wanted her. God only knew why, but he wanted her, loved her, said that he needed her. And God have mercy on her soul...she was going to use him. She did love him...but she couldn't use that as her excuse. This was no fairy-tale romance that she was living in. It was out of selfishness that she'd returned to him...nothing nobler than that. She'd found that there really had been no husband to return to...that he'd become entirely the possession of the specimen standing so silent and still in the basement. And so after a month or two, she'd turned her back on him as well, to find that Vincent was still there, waiting for her. She'd fallen back into Vincent's arms out of loneliness and hurt, and he'd accepted the backlash of her anger as readily as her hungry kisses.

And now...just as she couldn't use love as an excuse for her adultery, she wouldn't allow herself to think that it was out of maternal instinct that she was planning to desert her husband entirely and steal her unborn child away. She just wanted to keep the child, plain and simple. It was possessiveness more than love, for she couldn't quite lavish love on a child that was still more of an extension of her body than a separate being. And it was the last shred of her denial, her attempts to recapture a happier past. This child, their child, their first born son...this was the souvenir she would take away from Nibelheim, this was the memento she would keep of her marriage, this was the new life she would build her new life around.

With Vincent.

_You saved me once, and I turned my back on you. If I asked you to save me again, would you?_

A year in which time was suspended, Lucrecia's desperate, challenging request hanging in the air between them, and then those words in that husky whisper that she replayed over and over in her mind when she needed strength...

_I love you, I'll do anything for you, I swear it._

Lucrecia snapped her eyes open and glanced around the room, slightly disoriented. Had she dozed off while visiting days past? The window announced that dusk had just recently begun its nightly creeping across the sky, and Lucrecia sighed in relief. She still had an hour, at least, until true dark. Her oversized purse lay in the bottom of the closet, filled with tiny treasures with which to start her new life. Identification to get her past the guards, money to get her past the boundaries of the continent, and materia that could be exchanged for yet more money. One change of clothes folded carefully at the bottom, and the promise of Vincent waiting for her at the edge of town...with a much larger bag of his own. He had told her to pack lightly to avoid suspicion, for he himself could steal away with much larger luggage...so she had left blankets and a tent and more clothing in his capable hands. What else would he bring with him? Guns, bullets, more materia...that knife he kept strapped to his wrist. The knowledge and experiences he'd gained as a Turk...his skills, his abilities, his trade. Lucrecia would leave Nibelheim with her child and her lover, and within those two were contained her reason for leaving and living, and the means to protect that new life.

Wincing at the stiffness in her shoulders, Lucrecia slowly heaved herself out of the chair, obeying a sudden impulse to check on the contents of her purse just one last time. But as she turned towards the closet, a hand the size of a truck suddenly clenched down on her mind and squeezed. At least, that's what it most felt like to her startled psyche. Her pupils contracted as a blinding white light that only she could see flashed in front of her eyes, and then her vision was entirely blacked out as if that flash of light had been lighting striking her pupils. Her spinal column seemed to have disconnected from her brain, for as she fell to the floor, all impulses and sensations fled from her body. She could no longer feel the floor beneath her feet, and although she felt an impact vibration shudder up her back, she didn't feel her knees hit the floor...and then she couldn't feel her back, either...nor her shoulders or face or anything at all.

There was nothing...nothing save the blackness and even that was somehow inexplicably fading to an even more complete nothingness, leaving her with the presence, the wordless idea, the not-voice echoing in her head...

_YOU WILL NOT LEAVE HERE..._


	3. Part III - Lamentations

** Chapter 3: Exodus **

"You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heavin above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me..." Exodus 20:4~5a

* * * * *

She was burning up. 

But it wasn't as bad as before. But then again...before what? What was, "before?" Before today? Last week, last month, last year? As Lucrecia groaned and attempted to brace her arms against the icy, glassy floor of her cavern, her temporarily lucid mind grappled once more with the question of time. Specifically, her time here in this icy haven, prison, shelter, tomb. Her arms were weak and trembling, and the most that she could manage was to drag them underneath her face so that she could rest her flushed cheeks upon the sleeves of her white lab coat. White? No, not quite. What was this color that peeped through the rusty bloodstains? Not white by any stretch of the imagination...but not quite tan or brown or yellow. Let it be called, "grime." She wearily examined the dirt ground into the fibers of her coat for several minutes, her mind seemingly too exhausted with fever-dreams to do any deeper thinking than this. But gradually, Lucrecia noticed something. She was seeing. Her eyes were once again able to make out the shadows and folds of her coat where before, her altered, alien eyes had been wide open windows to whatever light chose to blind her, whether dim morning light beaming into the cave or bright midday sun bouncing across the ice-bound walls. She blinked, vaguely surprised, and struggled with the concept for a while until it finally sank in. A concept was caught at in passing, struggled with, and finally realized. The alien cells within her...were receding? 

She tucked down her head, peering into the patch of ice visible to her within the circle of her arms, and gazed down in wonder at her reflection. Brown. Brown eyes. Not those horrible, blank, swirling blue depths that she'd memorized day after jealousy-tainted day of staring up into the greenish-blue fluid of the specimen tank. Brown eyes with black pupils and a faint blue corona around the irises. Her eyes. She glanced upwards again to search the pallid hands. She had a brief memory - from when? - of waking in the cavern and glimpsing swollen purple vines creeping from the sleeves of her coat, slowly covering her hands like ivy over an old mansion. But those too were gone...no, not gone entirely, she saw, as she continued to examine her wrists. There were still faint, puffed lines, almost like the delicate tracery of veins underneath her skin. Rolling laboriously onto one side, Lucrecia clawed at her coat and shirt, pulling the cold, wet cotton away from her stomach with mixed hope and apprehension. Breathing heavily from the exertion these simple actions had wrought, she raised her head slightly and raked her newly-regained human eyes over her stomach to find that even the scar tissue that had so horrified her the day she'd discovered this cave - how long ago? - was gone, leaving only a faintly raised area of mottled bruises. 

A faint frown creased her brow before exhaustion forced her to drop her head back down. The lines of worry still marred her forehead as she reviewed the sight of her blue-purple-bruised stomach...that had no traces of thick, black thread on it. Where were the sutures? The stiff surgical thread that had been used to tie her back together - albeit sloppily - had not been the kind that dissolved with time. It stayed put until removed by hand...or until time and the elements broke it down. If accidentally put into the freezer, it grew brittle and broke...but only after a greatly extended time would it crumble entirely. How long? Who knew? No one had been interested in such a detail. But...it was a long time. And she was so weak...how long? How long had she been lying there? The scar tissue and alien flesh were receding, visible counterpart to the fact that her mind was clearer now than in all the - hours? days? how long? - that she had been lying there, her skin and flesh not entirely human...her entire body seething with the alien cells that she and the rest of the scientists had hailed as microscopic miracles of biogenesis and regeneration. Lying there without food or water, for hours or days or however long without suffering from thirst or hunger. Lying there with her body feeding upon itself, cells cannibalizing cells and a fever keeping her warm. Lying there, falling in and out of memories and nightmares in a mind perhaps not as sane and stable as it had been. 

No...not all memories and nightmares. She'd been lying there, slowly rising from her delirium towards sanity, and the closer she'd gotten to the surface of reality...the more strange dreams - no, visions - there had been. The wrenching, painful, heart-breaking memories and screaming nightmares had been slowly replaced with...visions. There was no other word for them. Lying breathless and weak on the frozen floor, Lucrecia turned her sluggish mind towards her hazy recollections. They had been like...dreaming of watching a movie...no, of having an out-of-body experience. She'd floated slightly above everyone's line of sight, as if the proverbial fly on the wall, and her view had been of the basement laboratory. Always the same place, the same vantage point...and her vision had been cloudy and nebulous, as if she were watching everyone through a sheet of the same rippled, obscuring glass that had paned each window in the mansion. But they had been recognizable...mostly...and the first of them had carried with it the additional shock of realization of the finality of her overwhelming loss. 

* * * * *

Her mind's eye opened slowly...not like an eyelid rising or a curtain parting, but like light filtering into a cave, or an idea slowly blossoming in a brain. 

_/...what.../_

She couldn't speak, nor could she even hear her voice in her own mind, but the question had been asked all the same. She tried to turn...actually, she thought of trying to turn, but there was no body to try with. She was just...there. 

_/...where.../ _

Again, no sound...not even a memory or echo of sound. Not even the word, really...just...the idea, the concept. What kind of dream was this? Not any of her crisp, clear memories made sharp and terrible with remembered pain and hurt. Not any of her nightmares, either, with horror upon horror magnified and multiplied by the fever burning up her mind and body. This...this was...different. This was hazy and white, milky and rippled, a floating, cloudy vision. There were no eyes to move nor head to dip, but she was looking down at the laboratory all the same. The dark bowels of the Nibelheim mansion where so much had happened. How could one life, one half-life in fact, have contained so much, so much? So much pain and anguish, jealousy and anger...so much blood. Too much. 

But what was this place now? She couldn't focus her non-existent eyes on any one feature, and yet it seemed that she could see everything at once without having to try. This had to be a dream, for why else would she be hovering over that familiar basement? Wasn't she...in some cave? Some small, icy cavern where she had collapsed and couldn't rise and could only wait for death or the alien cells to consume her? Was this a dream? Perhaps it was insanity, she noted in a clinically detached manner. If it was, let her stay here forever, she begged no one and everygod. Far better to lose herself in madness and memory than to awaken alone, feverish and dying. 

Someone entered the empty lab, bringing her attention around from her inward thoughts. If she'd had shape and form, her body would have jerked in startlement to see her husband walk in. Some part of her mind wished vaguely that if she were to spend her time in insanity-wrought delusions, it would have been nice to have been immersed in dreams of a happier place, or at least a happier time. For the husband that walked in bore the same cold, blank face that she'd last seen looming over her as she'd lain bleeding on the gurney, begging to hold her son. This dream, then...this delusion...this must be a visitation of time past, of her pregnancy, of the end of her marriage. 

As if sensing her thoughts, her presence, the dark-haired scientist made a straight line for where Lucrecia hovered and actually looked right up at her - at what? I'm not here; I'm in a vision - and smiled. She might have wished for a voice to cry out to him, or a hand to reach out to him...she might have, if the smile had not filled her mind with a chilling fear and loathing. The smile was utterly mindless. It was the sort of smile that religious fanatics wore when they were caught up in some glorious epiphany revealed only to them...blind worship, unnatural love, mindless devotion. It was utterly vapid, controlled, and heartless. It was the smile painted on wooden marionettes, and she would have cringed back from it if she had been able. 

_/...no not here not with him don't let me be trapped in this vision forever with him smiling at me like that not like that not.../ _

The horrified pleading seemed to emanate from her in waves, and here was the curious thing...she felt them being damped down, like embers underneath a booted foot. If she had commanded a voice, it would have rippled out feebly and then faded, as if a tiny whisper in a padded room. What little awareness and conscious thought she was able to command in this hazy vision seemed to be further muted by some outside force at the appearance of her husband. And instead of her own formless thoughts...other thoughts seeped into her mind like an intrusive, unexpected voice on the telephone. 

_/...YOU ARE COME.../ _

_ /...I HAVE BEEN.../ _

_ /...HERE.../ _

It was...acknowledgement and acceptance and a strange eagerness almost like hunger. It was simple phrases and complex layers of thought and feeling and strange emotions. There was no sound, no voice in her mind, but the words formed themselves of their own accord, putting words to an idea and defining it, labeling it, forming it. Lucrecia waited out the strange vision, now thinking of her fevered sleep with something akin to longing. Nightmares and painful memories seemed comforting when compared to this confusing vision. 

And onto the stage came a miniscule new player, a young child - barely out of infancy - with bright silver hair flying over the collar of his shirt. Through the door, over to a messy desk to peer uninterestedly at a stack of books, and then closer, into Lucrecia's immediate field of vision. The shining head tilted upwards to follow her husband's gaze, giving Lucrecia a fine view of the neatly molded face, fine boned and with a promise of great grace even while yet so young. And when she finally realized who the toddler must be, Lucrecia's own thoughts overrode the outside presence with a wordless scream of longing, loss, and horror at the mako-green eyes and needle marks riddling his delicate neck and arms. 

* * * * *

Rising out of the painful memory, Lucrecia sobbed out a few hitching breaths before finding something pathetic about the sound of her weak, mewling whimpers. Still curled on her side on the frigid floor, she gritted her teeth with the last stores of energy in her reserves and concentrated on making her breaths come more evenly. 

_Come on, 'Crecia, breathe...breathe. You had plenty of practice controlling your breaths. All those nights, all those days, trying not to disturb the others with your screams of pain and trying not to wake him as you cried, come on...breathe. Oh, but it was easier before, it was easier despite everything that was going on because I was still me, I was still human...and I still had someone, no, two someones to live for. _

And what did she have now? Her past was as distant and disconnected from her present as if she had been reborn into an entirely different person's body. And wasn't that nearly the truth? This scarred, unnatural body was as alien to her past as that hated specimen was to this planet. Lucrecia...daughter, student, lover, biologist, wife, assistant, mother. None of those titles could apply to her anymore, not really. Not to this broken body lying hidden in some nameless cavern. Her parents were dead, her studies over...the arms in which she'd slept were closed to her forever in one way or the other. And her son...her son...

* * * * *

She had lost track of how many times that the haze had brightened and broadened in her mind to reveal the dark basement. Vision had followed vision, a never-ending string of pearls that filled her now-dreamless sleep. But it was not a matched string...rather each new jewel followed a strangely natural progression, as if she were living the life that had been taken from her in her mind. In this detailed world that her mind had created, her husband changed clothes, cut his hair, even broke his glasses once and spent a few days stumbling about and cursing until replacements could be gotten. Lights were turned on and off, garbage bins were filled and emptied, and spiders spun their webs in dark and darkening corners. 

And the child grew. 

For the child, Lucrecia had pushed aside her misgivings and morals, letting her husband perform dangerous and experimental procedures within her very body. She had been exposed to more mako radiation than an entire battallion of Soldiers and been injected with more serums and solutions than any guinea pig in the history of science. For the child, Lucrecia had endured months of nausea and pain, fear and anxiety. She had choked down food she didn't want, rested even when she couldn't sleep, and exercised when even standing up made her break out into a cold sweat. She had even learned countless relaxation techniques to try and control her emotions, for too much stress might have harmed the fetus. For the child, Lucrecia had sacrificed all that she had to give, and all that she could ever be. 

And now it was for the sake of the child, or the hallucination of what the child might be like, that Lucrecia embraced her visions. There was nothing for her in reality, in the present, in the world outside her mind. But inside the darkness of her mind, there was the child. Bright green eyes and silver-white hair that grew wild and tangled with neglect. Pale skin riddled with bruises and needle marks. Chubby knees and curious, questing fingers that were constantly being slapped for their impertinence. For the sake of the child that ran about and looked around and grew taller and stronger, Lucrecia loved her visions and turned her back to the world around her, for to question too minutely the madness that had blessed her with a glimpse of her son might be to drive it away, as well. The scientist declared logic and reason her enemies, and would not think too closely upon the ridiculousness of living only to dream. It was like falling asleep in a blizzard, but it was all Lucrecia wanted. 

And so she never thought it through...never wondered about it...never realized that madness could not produce this orderly, logical procession of visions. 

...of her son. 

* * * * *

The light, the awareness, the room...it brightened and bloomed in her mind once more, and Lucrecia yearned and searched and would have strained her neck looking around if she had a body. Where was he? Her child, her son, her baby boy...

...but of course, he wasn't a baby any longer. 

Growing tall for his age, leaving behind baby dimples and rounded knees for a slender, reed-like body too long and limber for someone only six years old. Clever fingers and an ever more clever mind, that kept him out of more trouble than it got him in to. Books were read that should never have opened to his young hands and eyes, specimens were examined and rearranged on their shelves, needles and ampoules and even two scalpels had made their way into his pockets when his father's back had been turned. Every moment that Lucrecia dreamed was spent fixated on the boy, or yearning for him when he did not appear. She couldn't control how the scenes played out before her, but when her child did appear, more often than not she could draw him to her with her longing. 

She would cry out with no voice, stretch out arms that didn't exist, and somehow he would hear her. The bright silver head would stop its curious twisting and turning, and the gangling legs that somehow escaped childhood's clumsiness would bring him to her, the green eyes that seemed to burn brighter every year staring straight into her soul. 

_/...my child, my son, my baby.../_

And he would turn to look at her as if he could hear her cries. 

_/...oh my son, my son, how I wanted to hold you all these years.../_

Sometimes a pale hand would be raised, as if he were trying to touch her as well. 

_/...I love you, I love you, I love you.../_

And the demanding, desperate declaration would not drive him away...only once in a while he would look...confused. 

And sometimes his father was there. 

He had aged as had his son, but the cold blank eyes were the same, and as purely as Lucrecia yearned for her son, so did she hate her husband. Lying unconscious in her icy cave, revenge burned within her once more as she looked upon the face of her betrayer, but what could she do to him in her dreaming mind? If looks could kill, he would have fallen long ago, a weaponless wound gaping in his back. And if hearts could truly break, perhaps she would have never gotten the chance to do even that. Oh, and if telekinesis existed, truly Hojo was fortunate that it had not been granted to his long lost wife. 

But this time, neither Hojo nor his prodigy were apparent in the dim and dusty basement laboratory. This happened occasionally, where Lucrecia's dreams were no more than still pictures of a remnant of her old life, and she had learned to simply watch and wait, for surely struggling against one's madness was madness in and of itself. And so she watched through her somehow wavering vision. 

She watched the dust fall and gather in microscopic layers over the desk and the floor, the tops of bookshelves and the edges of the tomes lying within. She watched a spider spin its web, endless loops and whorls patiently cast, from one anchoring line to the next until a beautiful spiral had been woven. And then she watched the dust settle upon the web and the waiting spider. A fly staggered by, lazy with hunger in this dark, un-nourishing grotto, and she remembered the droning sound of its wings from another day long past, even though she could not hear it now. It stumbled and bumbled around the room, and came to rest at long last on the dusty edge of a beaker, while the spider watched with eight sparkling, ravenous eyes. But the little insect tottered, slipped, and then fell into the beaker with a tiny plink that Lucrecia could not hear, and lay still. One strand of dust wafted down after it and came to rest over one of its curled and crumpled legs. Lucrecia watched, and continued to watch, and then grew uneasy for the first time in countless dreams. 

Where were they? 

She looked at the room before her with new eyes, new interest, new feelings of unrest. While living - for she could hardly call herself alive now - she had looked about her with excitement, apathy, and then loathing. In her bloody last days there, she had viewed the walls with an adrenaline high of fear. And now, with this room her only link to her son, she found herself somehow afraid for the basement. The dust lay thick, and no footprints marred its surface. And the books upon books that had been constantly taken down and read and then hastily cast aside for another were all lined up carefully within their shelves, orderly as SOLDIERs. It looked...abandoned. 

A low wave of panic surged quietly up and out of her heart, and washed over and through her surroundings. But even more than ever before, her thoughts and feelings were damped down and muted. The suppression served only to upset her more, and Lucrecia's mind grew active once again, shaken out of its drowsy, uncaring watchfulness by the thought of having lost this strange link to her child. 

_/...Sephiroth! Sephiroth, where are you?.../ _

She cried out and out in her mind, sending out waves and pulses of panicked need. Twice before, and only twice, she'd managed something precious, something strange. Twice before, after he'd reached his long-limbed stage and left babyhood behind, she'd touched his mind with hers. Not just a vague reaction to her longing, but something even more, something further, something deeper. 

The lights had been off, but the basement area closest to her field of vision had been lit with an eerie greenish glow, and with it she'd looked upon the dark and deserted lab and felt desolate and alone. She'd cried out then, too, and after a moment, seen something in her mind's eye, a dream within her mad dream. It was like a ghost of her imagination hesitantly treading in her consciousness. 

Sephiroth, her darling boy, her silver-haired angel...grown from the infant she'd yearned to cuddle to a stern and serious preschooler with eyes far too aged and angry for so few years. It was just his form, or at least, a vision of it, and his expression was one of open curiosity such as she'd not seen recently. 

_/...Sephiroth!.../ _

...?...

_/...Sephiroth, it's me, it's your mother, oh my child, my baby.../_

...mother?... 

_/...Yes, yes, your mother. Oh, I've missed you and love you, oh Sephiroth, how I want to hold you.../_

And with that brief exchange, the flickering doppelganger had disappeared. She reached out once more, but nothing came. Yet there was no time to mourn, for shortly after, the child himself had appeared before her, blinking sleepily in the harsh lights that his father had turned on after herding him into the room for his morning series of injections. And Sephiroth, once having rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, had stared up at her, and not stopped staring until dragged bodily away. 

But there was nothing now, either in Lucrecia's mind, or in the dusty, desolate room of her vision, and she cried all the louder for it. 

* * * * *

The pitch black of unconsciousness hazed and grew brighter until she found herself once more caught up in one of the visions that had replaced her nightmares and remembrances. Lucrecia attempted to place herself, but with little success. This vision was not of the familiar basement where she'd watched the bright-haired toddler grow steadily taller, stronger, and more strange. Familiar...she had grown accustomed to the visions as their frequency increased, leaving her little time - _time? How long?_ - to do anything but watch these strange movies play out in her mind and blank out in between them. In memory, she caught glimpses of times she had awoken into her ice-bound cave, but these were fleeting images snatched at and soon lost. A brief remembrance of waking and returning to the endless and futile questioning of how long she had lain there...she struggled to recapture the curiosity, the wondering, but nothing would stay with her for very long. Her moments of clarity were now reserved for these visions alone, but they were not complete. Clear-minded, yes...but only to a certain extent. Never in these visions did she have a body or a voice, nor was she in complete control of her thoughts. It was as if her mind had separated into two portions, with her original mind the submissive voyeur to its strange new counterpart. 

And now...now, what strange turn had her madness taken, that she had opened her mind to this confusion? Replacing the familiar and by now comforting basement laboratory was a cylindrical space no larger than...well, no larger than the specimen tank that it had been enclosed in. And beyond the space, there was nothing but a shadowy metallic form, clinging to the outside of the curved, clear wall as if it were some parasite or fungus. Cables and tubes, horribly familiar, snaked upwards from the lower boundary of her field of vision and exited the glass wall to disappear beyond. 

_/...oh God oh God oh God.../_

She couldn't recall beginning this pitiful, horrified chant, but once started, she could not stop. And what was she pleading to God for? Who knew? She was only aware of a thought barely realized, a theory just beginning to take shape, and although still so nebulous that she hadn't put words to it, she knew it would be something terrible to behold. 

_/...Sephiroth! Sephiroth, where are you?!.../ _

Pushing away the idea that was slowly but surely taking form, she screamed out in her mind for her son, desperate to be returned to her one joy, her one comfort, her one remaining idol. She longed for the shadowed basement with the same anguish and longing with which she'd cried out to hold her newborn son in her arms the hour he'd been born. And just as he had not been given to her then, neither were the visions of him returned to her now. So Lucrecia screamed silently in her glass prison, in her mad world, until all went dark once more. 

* * * * *

The light of her visions burst upon her mind's eye like a fireworks display, and the effect upon her was not unlike that of being suddenly hurled into a freezing lake. Startled and dazed, Lucrecia did not even notice at first the other voice that pulsed and thrummed around her. 

_/...COME TO ME.../ _

_ /...FIND ME HERE.../ _

_ /...HEAR MY CALL.../ _

No voice, but there were phrases echoing through her mind all the same. There were no words, but the meanings were clear. Like a throbbing heartbeat, the summoning - for there was no other word to describe it - filled her mind like an enormous church bell being rung insistently, its reverberating call echoing through the countryside to call its worshippers together. 

And faintly, in between the overwhelming, demanding pulses, she glimpsed something she'd only felt twice before, but recognized immediately. 

_/...Sephiroth!.../ _

Her cry of joy was immediate, and her longing came alive in an instant, blotting out even the unceasing summons in its intensity. The feeling of reaching with arms she didn't have, and calling out with a voice she didn't have flowed out from her with all the love she still held in her heart, and this time, there was no muting, no suppression. Instead, she could almost feel her yearning go flowing out and out, beyond the glass wall that she hardly registered, beyond what rooms and corridors that her chamber rested within, and beyond what hills and valleys might stand between her and her son. 

She kept up her own weak, urgent summons amidst the louder not-voice, hoping above all that she could somehow call to her the vision of her son. Irrational, even mad, and yet based on a truth that she wouldn't give herself the time to acknowledge. Her son was near, she could feel it. How she could feel it did not matter. All she knew or wanted was her son. 

_/...Sephiroth! Sephiroth, oh my baby, my boy, my son!.../ _

If she'd been able, she would have laughed aloud. He was coming closer! She could feel it, she could sense his mind, she could nearly touch his thoughts. Oh, but he was confused...she would reassure him, she would keep him safe, she would hold him in her arms and all would be made right. 

She was closer to madness now than ever before, and cared not at all. 

_/...Sephiroth! It's me, it's your mother. Come to me, my son. Let me hold you! Oh, how I've missed you.../ _

Suddenly, the twisted metal that hugged the crystal cylinder before her shook violently, and then seemed to fall away in a shower of sparks from the wires holding it fast. Tears of oil and grease came dripping down the glass, and Lucrecia herself would have wept at the sight if she'd had eyes. 

It was him.

There was no mistaking it, although it was a shock to see him so tall and strong. So tall! No longer a baby, no longer a boy...the figure standing before her was a man in his prime, with rippling muscles and chiseled features. Oh, but the bright shining eyes, the long silver hair, the scent-touch-taste of his mind was still the same. He raised a fist, and was the perfect picture of a young, avenging god, and his mother cried out to him once more as he struck a blow to the glass separating him from her.

_/...My son!.../_

But he did not reach for her with upraised arms that begged for the long-awaited embrace. Instead, he raised a sword. And oh, it all happened so fast...

The pulsing, thrumming summons stopped with one last triumphant shout that nearly crushed Lucrecia's mind, and then the blade came whistling towards her. A quick spray of some bluish ichor fanned up in front of her, and then all was black for the split second that it took for Lucrecia to open her eyes and jerk herself up in shock from the frozen floor of her cavern. 

* * * * *

Outside the cave, the waterfall disguising the entrance roared loudly down into the mountain lake that it fed just as it had the day Lucrecia had first stumbled near. Across the river that flowed from the lake, a shining city in the air towered over a searing desert. Miles and miles away, children were born, taxes were paid, loved ones died. The specimen taken from the broken glass jar was raised and trained and used and killed and cloned and reborn. The last full-blooded Ancient returned to the Planet, and decades later her daughter followed in her self-sacrificing steps. Time passed outside, but within the icy cavern, Lucrecia opened her eyes and began to shudder with only the barest beginnings of the realization that she'd been lying on her icy floor for nearly thirty years. 


	4. Part IV - Revelation

** Chapter 4: Revelation **

"During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them." Revelation 9:6"

* * * * *

She was dying.

She knew it, believed it, could feel it all throughout her familiar and alien body. Clarity, reality, time and space had all been given back to her in a frightening, confusing rush that her mind could barely deal with. The strange detachment was gone, taking with it the defensive wall of disinterest in which her awareness had been enveloped, buried, drowned. It was as if she had been dreaming, drifting in a warm sea of unconsciousness while vague and disjointed paintings flitted across her sleeping mind. Time had blurred, wavered, and then finally disappeared altogether, leaving her in an endless loop of dreams and darkness. And now, she had suddenly been woken up by being flung into an icy sea. An abrupt, shocking, heart-stopping plunge back into reality that nearly killed her with its dual attack on her physical and mental self.

And as she no longer slept, there were no longer the dreams, the nightmares, the visions. Gone...completely, utterly, and abruptly as if the visions had been a physical bond to her son, a cord untied, cut loose, severed.

Severed...

Like her head should be, shouldn't it? She'd seen it happen; she'd seen her death. Her son, her beautiful son, so tall and strong and...and old! How had he gotten so old in the space of a few breaths in which she'd slept and dreamt and slept some more? And why? Why had that gleaming blade been raised and then brought down toward her neck? After so many years of longing for him and yearning for him and calling to him...after she'd summoned him with her frantic, crazed cries and he had destroyed the distance and darkness separating them. After all of that...he had unsheathed his sword and used it to cut off her head.

Lucrecia lay trembling on the ice, drawing in soft, hitching breaths and releasing them in barely audible sobs, tears leaking slowly out of her eyes and making their sluggish way to the floor where they froze, sealing her cheek and hair to the ice drop by drop. She stared at nothing for a while, lost in her madness, lost in her memories, breathing and sobbing and wondering why he'd killed her.

_My baby, my child, my son, my son, my son..._

Within the cavern, Lucrecia wept and wondered why she'd been killed and felt as if she were dying, and without, the sun rose as it always had and flung pale, watery rays over the land, bringing light and portent of coming warmth. One brave beam darted through a shallow spot in the waterfall crashing over the entrance to Lucrecia's icy prison and let fall across the frozen floor for a brief moment before retreating hastily, never to return. The shadows trapped within the ice shifted and flickered slightly as Lucrecia lay on its surface, as equally bound and chained by her mind as she was entombed within the ice.

Lucrecia's eyes rested on the ice for a while without seeing it, and her mind noted that a certain shadow within the ice was a certain shade of blue without realizing what it was she compared it to. She lay there, breathing and sobbing and wondering and not seeing the ground she was looking at, and who knew how long she lay. Nothing happened between one moment and the next, but suddenly her eyes focused on the ice-ghost trapped underneath the glassy floor and thought to herself, "It's the same color as that thing's eyes."

Deep blue, chilling blue, murky blue. The bottom of a lonely lake, shadows in the corner of a deserted laboratory, eyes that seemed to mock her from behind a curved glass wall. The eyes that she had felt boring into the nape of her neck as she moved about the basement labs, the eyes that she had glimpsed staring at her from the cavern floor, the alien eyes that had replaced her own just as alien cells had replaced much of her skin and flesh.

A sob hitched in Lucrecia's throat, and she blinked rapidly a few times, as if startled from a light doze or deep thought.

Those eyes...those alien eyes were my eyes, and I saw them in the ice. But they're gone...I got my own eyes back because...because the cells were receding or dying or in regression some how...

She glanced at her wrist, which was lying motionless before her face as if it belonged to someone else entirely. The skin that was visible to her was unmarked by the mottled, fleshy ropes that had once spread themselves out from her stitches to cover nearly her entire body. There were faint traces of the former infestation, visible as blue and purple stains, as is of an extra network of veins, but nothing more. Not satisfied with the limited view of her hand, Lucrecia attempted to sit up, but only managed to jerk her upper body so that she could get her right arm underneath, propping herself up slightly. She winced in pain at the incredible stiffness that made even breathing a chore, and at the sharp agony of having several locks of hair ripped out of her scalp, as their ends were anchored into the ice on which she had been sleeping for so long.

How long?

How long had she been lying there, sleeping and waking and dreaming and changing back and forth from human to alien to something in between? Long enough for those alien cells to multiply and spread across her stomach, her breasts, her arms...and then to slowly fade away again. Long enough for her to sleep and wake and cry out because while she had been dreaming, the invading cells had remade her eyes into those of that thing in the tank, and even the faint light in the cave was too bright and painful for her to look at through those alien eyes...

...while she had been dreaming...

...through those alien eyes...

Mad or sane, dreaming or awake, there remained enough of the scientist and the student so that her flickering, seemingly random thoughts were suddenly marshaled into shocking order.

It wasn't possible.

It wasn't possible for her to have lain in this cave, on this ice, for so long, with her wounds and infections and fatigue, and to sleep and dream and wake without dying. It wasn't possible for her to burn with fever and shiver with cold, to never drink nor eat nor feel hunger nor thirst for years upon years. It wasn't possible for her to lay on the ground without moving for decades and then jerk herself up to stare in dawning realization and horror at a hand that was not shriveled nor curled into a claw, the muscles not atrophied and useless underneath skin that was not cracked and leathery from exposure.

It wasn't possible, but it was, wasn't it? Hadn't she spent entire nights lying awake in her bed, unable even to close her eyes because of the brilliant possibilities that lay before her, before her husband, before their careers? Hadn't they witnessed miracles with their very eyes? Hadn't the wonders of creation and re-creation unfolded in the cramped basement of Shinra's mansion?

It wasn't possible, but it had to be. Because the ice had thickened around her hair. Because the stitches had broken down in the freezing cold and were no longer protruding from her flesh. Because the cells had multiplied and crept through and over her body and altered her very structure and form and then retreated to leave her body - the hand she was gazing down at right now - unscarred. Because she had dreamt and looked through those alien eyes and watched her son grow from a toddler to a man.

Could she have been lying here for so long? Thirty years, perhaps, in which her baby had grown to be a man in his prime. Thirty years in which she had allowed her longing for her son to lull her into a dull, listless sleep in which she waited out the years hoping for the next dream, the next vision, the next glimpse of her child. The cells, the infestation, the...connection to that thing, that thing...the cells had invaded her body and that thing had invaded her mind. Oh, but she had embraced it willingly for the sake of those visions. Ignored the significant viewpoint she had of the basement, the watery vision, the strange otherly presence, and a hundred thousand million other signs that she and the Goddess had been one. That every vision of her son had been seen through the murky blue eyes that she had grown to hate during her pregnancy. That when she had yearned and longed and called to her son, he had approached not a brunette woman with her arms outstretched, but an alien specimen in a tank. That her last memory of her son was of him shattering the specimen tank and cutting off the alien's head - why? - and severing her connection to it, to him in the same stroke.

Lucrecia gave a desperate heave and managed to sit mostly upright, her elbows locked and her arms tremblingly bracing her over the ice. An attempt to clinically review her medical status only made her shaking even more violent.

Gone. All gone. No more fever ravaging her body, no more malignant presence obscuring her mind, no more delusions clouding over the passage of time. The alien cells within her lay nearly dormant, giving her back the many layers and strata of pain and sensation. Instead of the one overruling, whole-body pain, there were now myriad aches and strains throughout her being. With every pulse that coursed through her veins, her temples throbbed as if they were an extension of her circulatory system, pumping pain and disorientation through her mind instead of oxygen. She could feel the cold of the ice against her skin, and the sensation itself made her realize that she had not even felt the temperature for too long. Her joints were stiff, her muscles ached, her eyes watered and stung and blurred, and every sense seemed to be overloading with input and impulses long dampened down and deadened by her unnatural sleep. She was not free, however. If her body had somehow been completely cleansed of the infection, surely she would have begun to feel the effects of being wholly human once more. There would be patches of frostbite over her exposed flesh, and surely she would be wracked with hunger pangs and a terrible thirst. Perhaps she would have even shriveled up into a withered husk within a few moments of being freed in some strange, cataclysmic degeneration.

After all, if she was guessing correctly, she hadn't eaten anything in over three decades.

She alternated between sobs and silent, staring wonder for so long that finally she ended up doing neither, thinking nothing, and barely even breathing. She simply sat hunched over the ice, weary mind having given up any pretense of work, and weary body doing the bare minimum of duties necessary for continued existance. Her eyes flickered randomly about the cavern for lack of anything else to do, and then settled upon a distinct brown shape several feet beyond where Lucrecia sat.

The book. Shrouded in stiff, rotten leather, a tome so thick and filled that some might call it a life-work, but Lucrecia knew better. She knew that the crabbed writing and precise diagrams and formulas that filled its crackling pages were only a mockery of life at best...thought processes that spat upon all that was good and wholesome about living, sentences of hatred penned under the guise of science and learning. She knew all this.

But she did not know all.

Before the thoughts could be fully formed in her mind, she was crawling toward the book, the notebook, the journal, the manual of her husband's that she had stolen away with her from the mansion on the night she was to have died. It was a heavy, ragged, real piece of the blessing and curse that they had discovered locked away in the ice. Lucrecia had nothing to do but to turn her mind over and over the staggering puzzle of who and what she might have become, how long she had lain her in this icy cave, and how...her bruised and whimpering mind turned instead to the record of her husband's vengeance as being a far less troublesome matter to pore over.

At the mansion, mere days before her labor had begun, she had stumbled upon this record one night. Sleepless and restless and frustrated, she had roamed the hallways of the mansion, wandering aimlessly and pointlessly. She had picked up whatever her eyes had fallen upon and set them down again without really looking at them, trailed fingers over dusty surfaces, and kicked at various papers and furniture lying about on the floor. And then down to the basement, picking at splinters on the creaking wooden bannister, wrinkling her nose at the damp smell of the tunnels, and shrugging indifferently at the rats that swarmed away from her steps.

In the last, confusing days of her pregnancy, her mind had been indifferent to nearly everything. With the goal of her son so close before her, she had shut out the rest of the world. The worries and fears that had consumed her thoughts became nothing but mist, and she had even paced restlessly before the specimen tank without even a thought to the heavy blue eyes on the other side of the glass. And that night, she had wandered through the back library of the laboratory without a care for her husband's increasingly furious demands that she leave his workspace alone.

It was as if she had been sleepwalking, and sleepwalking, she had walked through her husband's dreams and nightmares. There had been thin journals and notebooks stacked upon each other in a drawer, lab sheets and printouts and schematics piled high on the desk, towers of reference materials and books on the tables, and everywhere, the same cramped writing scrawling notations and notes over every available space.

She had read them all. Some she had glanced at, recognized, and passed over. Some she had skimmed, did not understand, and left. And the rest, she had read, frowned at, and then forgotten. There had been suppositions and daring experiments planned, small notations in margins where he explained things to himself in ink, random lists of things to do, work to delegate, and people...people to do something with. This last list had been written down meticulously on the back of one of his journals. She had run one fingernail down the names, noted her own at the top, most of the laboratory staff in the middle, and the three Turks at the bottom, with Vincent's name written and rewritten at the very end. And going backwards through the pages, she had found more of a diary than a scientific journal, and had read through it with the same uncomprehending, uncaring blankness with which she had perused the list of names. Hopes, fears, suspicions, determination, dread, victory, defeat, doggedness, terror, madness...it had all been written down in pages and pages of rambling and cries and rages, and Lucrecia had felt sadness, compassion, and a vague, hopeless yearning for something she knew she had lost, and could not remember what it was.

The last item she had pored through had been a weighty book, bound in leather and lying hidden underneath many layers of printouts and notes. Pulling it out from underneath the concealing papers, she had read the first few pages, flipped through some of the next sections, and then paled, frowned, bit her lip, and jumped ahead to read the very end. The best of the scientist's mind, driven by the worst of the husband's heart. The book had begun with the usual scientific theory, along with the usual statements, suppositions, and foreshadows. And then it had launched into the planned experiment, detailing all of the preparations and planning in the minutest way, as if pride had demanded that every atom of this glorious idea be displayed. And at the very end, a thin section of blank pages preceded by one quick paragraph, all pretenses at objective, unemotional science discarded.

_He has separated me from my wife for the remainder of this short life. Now let me separate him from her forever...through life. Soon, Her son will be born, the vessel will pass away, and he shall enter into eternity through my hands and Her power._

This had pierced even the thick fog of her drug- and horomone-fogged mind, and without stopping to puzzle out every inch of this last paragraph, she had caught up the book to her breast and begun swiftly walking back to the room where she had slept alone these past months. But once in the main lab, the shadowy space lit dimly by the glowing specimen tank, her footsteps had slowed, and the fog had descended once more. Without a single further thought, she had turned, replaced the manual, and plodded woodenly back upstairs to lie in bed until daybreak, when she had fallen into a fitful sleep, haunted by nightmares that she could not remember later on.

And then, less than a week later, she had spied that same book, now marked with bloody fingerprints and fresh notes in the last pages, lying on the gurney where she had given birth, and Vincent had been given a living death. More pain than blood running through her veins, burning with anger and hurt and hatred as well as a high fever, she had caught up the book, and this time, escaped with it up the stairs.

And now here she was, thirty years later, finally turning its pages with a faint, flickering thought that perhaps answers lay within. If not for her, then perhaps for the man on whom these malignant thoughts had been turned. She hadn't ever read through the book in its entirety. She'd only read through the first few chapters, read with growing horror the meticulous planning and diabolical hopes that her husband had penned in its pages. She hadn't had the stomach to continue on through the pages and pages of actual experimentation and surgery and torture. At first, she hadn't even had the ability to wholly believe that he could do such a thing. And when it was too late, when the book had been finished, down to the notation of how many nails had been driven into the coffin, all she had been able to do was to pick it up and spirit it away, in the vague hope that what had been used to capture the details of the destruction of a man might one day be used to restore him.

But she read it now.

She wanted to know, needed to know, had to know. And she now had ability beyond measure to believe in her husband's capacity for evil. Despite outward appearances she knew in her heart that Vincent, of the two of them, had retained the greater share of humanity. What remained of the scientist and woman within her she determined to use for his sake, and in that hopeful resolve lay a last scrap of retribution for her own soul.

She read, and she wept from eyes that should have been dead and dried these three decades. As surprised as she was to grapple with the idea that she had been dreaming and sleeping for so long, and as incredible as it was that she should still be alive, she was even more shocked to find that there was yet human emotion to be found in the midst of her confusion and slowly receding madness. She read and read on, taking as long to run her eyes over the pages as it must have taken her husband to write them so very long ago. And she kept on reading, stopping only to weep, for what was food, and shelter, and sleep to her? Nothing, just as they had been nothing to her all these months and years in which she'd left it to the alien cells within her body to keep up her life. And so she ignored all else in the pursuit of her husband's mind through the leaves of this crumbling book. As she stumbled over the last few pages, the shadows on the floor in front of her wavered suddenly, and she immediately sensed that the flickering pattern that was presented to her was unfamiliar. Years upon years of dreaming and waking on this same ice...she had never cared nor thought of it, but her subconscious had all this time made note of the patterns in the ice, and in all that time, this strange shifting of blues and greys had never presented itself.

Because she had never had any visitors.

As quickly as her stiff and reluctant muscles would allow, Lucrecia twisted and turned her body, letting the heavy book slip out of her lap, so that she could peer tremblingly over one shoulder at the rippling sheets of water that hid the entrance to the cave from the outside world. Through the moving crystal curtain, a dark shadow loomed. As she watched with horrified eyes, though it was strange, that after all she had experienced and what she had just read, that anything should hold the power to further horrify her, the shadow seemed to solidify, to grow even darker and more compact.

Someone was walking through the waterfall.

With her breath coming in fast, shallow gasps, Lucrecia began crawling toward the back of the small cave, scraping and clawing her way over the frozen ground, as if safety awaited her a few feet away, rather than an unmoving wall of ice. Ever keeping her eyes trained on the approaching shadow, she groped her way backwards, accidentally kicking the leather-bound book she had been reading off to the side as she passed it, and then nearly yelped aloud as the usually solid floor slipped and gave way underneath her left elbow. She glanced down, and spied a thin metal tube peeping out from underneath her tattered lab coat.

The Death Penalty.

Stupid, ostentatious trademark of the gunsmith's, to name all of his creations, and the gift she had commissioned for Vincent had been no exception. The Death Penalty, the gunsmith had announced proudly, for all to whom it was chosen to bring down upon, there would be no escape nor rescue. Then, it had appealed to her, that she would be giving such a weapon of power and absoluteness to her lover. And at the time, she had not formed the idea of Vincent actually using it on her husband, but oh, she had thought on it later on...she had thought on it many times later on.

And now, she curled her fingers around the weapon and jammed it into a coat pocket. She'd cried out to God for death more times than she could remember, but suddenly she did not wish to die, and the fragile, undying woman clung to the knowledge of the pistol in her pocket for assurance that she was not entirely without hope of living...or at least, continuing this strange existence for just a while longer.

The shadow rippled and flared behind the last curtain of spray, growing more distinct as the person or creature neared, and fear lent Lucrecia the last burst of strength she needed to reach the altar at the back of the cave. Having gained her objective, she collapsed at the feet of the frozen dais. Her breaths coming in sharp, whispering gasps, she clawed at the jagged back wall of the cavern until she was upright, and then turned to wait for the appearance of her unexpected visitor. The pistol was a dead weight dragging the remains of her tattered lab coat askew, but it was a strange, faint comfort to have it there.

The last curtain of water parted, and the shadow was resolved into a shadowy figure. It was followed by two young people, a man and woman, both of striking appearance, but Lucrecia's eyes remained, then and later on, locked onto the man who walked in first.

She had watched her son grow, and glimpsed him as a man in his prime. She had woken up, and also awoken to the idea that thirty years had passed. And just now, she had been reading all the details of her husband's vengeance against the man who had stolen away his wife's heart, if not her body. But none of this had adequately prepared her mind, reeling from shock after impossible shock, for the sight of Vincent...not as he was now.

Outwardly, she remained standing, pressed up against the back wall of the cavern, her eyes wide and her face stricken with fear. Inwardly, she screamed and fainted and prayed all at once.

Everything was changed, and yet he was immediately recognizable. His hair was long now, and fell in tumbled layers by his face...his youthful face...and past his shoulders, held barely out of his eyes - _so bright!_ - by a blood red bandana. The rest of his lean body was clothed in black, but for his left arm, encased...no, replaced by a gleaming metal claw. A cape that vied with his eyes for sheer bloodiness swirled around him as he began walking toward her, after his first surprised pause at seeing someone...seeing her.

For there was recognition in his eyes...his red, red eyes...surprise and disbelief giving way to grim certainty and a great, dreadful pain that she knew must be reflected in her own expression. His gaze flickered down her body and then returned to her eyes, and she conjured up the vision she must be presenting to him. Her grimy and tattered clothes, the dried blood on her shoes, and overall, the undeniably aged appearance of all about her...except her body. There were traces of bruises and blue veins faintly visible, but it was on firm skin, unwrinkled by age or elements. The hair that straggled down her neck was still brown, and she realized all of a sudden that not only was she still alive...she was as youthful and unchanged in age as Vincent was.

But it was not enough to give her hope that time had not passed her by so quickly as she thought. She and her lover might not have aged, but time had gone by just the same. The cells, her eyes, the visions...there was too much proof piled around her for her to cling to one strange string and hope.

He was nearing...ten more steps and he would be before her. Close enough to touch, to feel flesh and warmth once more instead of ice and more ice, to hear his voice, to...

...close enough for him to see the remains of the alien flesh that had crept over her skin and possessed her.

"Stay back!" she shouted suddenly, her voice hoarse from long disuse and fierce with mingled fear and despair. His steps halted immediately at her cry, and in her words, and in his pause, Lucrecia acknowledge all. It was over. Her past life and this current existence, any ties she had to her husband or her lover, any hope that she might have nurtured, any right she might have claimed to life outside of this icy cave...it was as if it had never existed. There was only one thing left for her, and now, having read the book and seen with her own eyes its results...surely that one thing was all that remained for Vincent as well.

"Lucrecia..."

The voice was a catalyst to her despairing mindset, and she slid her hand into the deep outside pocket of her lab coat, curling her fingers around the pistol that lay within.

_Look at him. LOOK at him!_

...look at me.

We're dead. We're dead. If we're not dead then we're dying and if we're not dying then we should be.

She would kill him - release him - and then shoot herself as well, and all would be over, as it should have been so long ago. Neither of them should have ever left the basement of that mansion, covered in blood and gore and becoming less and less human with every heartbeat. They should have died, and then none of these years, these nightmarish years would have happened. They would have been at peace...

But there was one thing yet that stayed Lucrecia's hand, and after a long, drawn-out staring contest between the two recreations that had staggered out of Nibelheim, she said, in a small, trembling voice, "Sephiroth..."

The name was all she could get out of the hundred and more questions she wished to ask about him. Was it true? Were her visions really real? Had he truly undergone all of those injections and treatments and hardships while learning to walk and talk? Had he truly grown into that strong, cold man she had glimpsed for just one moment? The last time she had seen him, really seen him, was as an infant.

"I...dream about him so often," she murmured, in a voice that threatened to falter and fade at any moment. Images from her dreams and visions flickered before her eyes, melting and breaking her heart at the same time, and weakening her desperate, deadly resolve of a moment ago. "My baby," Lucrecia whispered brokenly, "I never even got to hold him..."

The pained, glowing red eyes shifted from her gaze, and Vincent turned his head away from, as if he could not bear the sight of her any longer. She continued to stare at him from the back of the cavern, silently entreating him to speak, if he knew anything at all of her son. But he only shook his head, as if he could hear the mental pleas, and then said softly, "Lucrecia...it's been thirty-five years. Sephiroth is dead."

_Dead._

But how could that be? Her son, her beautiful, her strong, her perfect son. She had dreamt of him so often, watched him grow...but the last she had seen of him, he had been...a soldier. Dressed and armed for war. And he was human...enhanced, certainly, but human...unlike his mother, his unnatural mother. Humans die...

Her knees trembled and then gave way, sending her crashing to the ice. Sharp footsteps brought her head up immediately, and she saw Vincent - red-eyed, golden-clawed, demon-bringer Vincent - walking swiftly toward her, bending slightly so as to be able to help her to her feet. So helpful, so caring, Vincent. Always so solicitious, never saying a word, but always there to help her stand, help her up, help her live each day. But they weren't in Nibelheim any longer, and they weren't those foolish young lovers any longer. Lucrecia had staggered to her own feet, alone and dying in the mansion, and had clawed her own way out of the basement, and had been living in a nightmare ever since. They weren't in Nibelheim any longer. They were monsters.

"NO!"

Vincent stopped again at the word, delivered with such violence that it seemed more a snarl than a shout. And he did not begin walking forward again, not even when Lucrecia slipped while trying to stand up once more and nearly set off the gun she had leveled at his chest. She shook her head at him, face twisted with grief, and repeated the syllable once more, but in a tearful whisper. It was denial that her son was dead, and acceptance of the same. It was a cry against Fate, and a plea for mercy undeserved.

The pistol trembled and shook in her grasp, and she whispered in a voice no less steady, "Leave."

Pain and pleading shone in those glowing red eyes, but she repeated her command in a stronger voice before he could speak, backing up her order by pulling back the hammer of the weapon she had commissioned for him so long ago. After another long, wordless look, he turned and walked out without a backwards glance, taking with him the two silent watchers who had stayed behind at the entrance. Behind the veil of water, the shadows flared and diminished, and then they disappeared.

Left alone once more, the cave cold and quiet and unchanged as if the past few minutes had been another fever dream, Lucrecia suddenly fell to her knees once more, the pistol and even her body too heavy to hold up. Thirty-five years...thirty-five years. She moaned the words over and over to herself as if chanting the horrible fact would deaden the blow somehow. Such a stupid notion...how could she even begin to grapple with the realization that her dreams and visions had been reality, filtered through the hazy orbs of a creature suspended in a glass tube. She had been lying in an ice-bound cavern for over three decades, kept alive by the same alien cells that had slowly taking her over for a time, and seeing with another creature's eyes through some unholy bond.

A faint glimmer of the scientist she had been marveled at it all, and what remained of the woman only shuddered at the detachment and ignorance contained in that scholar's admiration.

But she was alive. She was still alive. However much she might want to, there was no ignoring the fact that Lucrecia lived and breathed and thought. An old physician's adage that she'd learned to laugh at was that as long as there was life, there was hope. But for her, hope was too uplifted a word. Future, purpose...those too gave the impression that what lay beyond held the potential to be better, to be brighter, to be more.

For Lucrecia, there was life, and therefore possibility.

She looked at the pistol laying by her side. She looked at the book, lying unnoticed near another curve of the cavern's interior. She looked at the waterfall, bright and glittering in the sunlight that danced outside.

Outside.

Outside, where Vincent had gone. Vincent, who had somehow escaped from the mansion. Vincent, who had lived for years upon years while she had slept and dreamed and barely survived even that. Vincent, who had finally found her as she'd prayed so long ago, and whose first impulse had been to reach her, to help her...

Oh, and that look in his eyes! It had taken her back through three decades in an instant. So much had changed, but not all, not all. That look, that hurt, proud, dying, angry, confused, determined look.

_I threw myself at him and then threw him away and he went...he went when I told him to go away but he looked at me, he looked at me just like he did just now and it was acquiescence and promise all at once. That he would do as I said, that he would leave and leave at once, but not stay away. That no matter what, there was one thing I couldn't make him do, and that was to stay away from me, to stop watching over me, to give up his place as my guardian. He would walk away from me now but he would be back, to watch, to guard, to protect. He wouldn't stay away. He won't. He'll be back._

But only the book and the gun would be there to meet him.


	5. Part V - Judges

** Chapter 5: Judges **

"At her feet he sank, he fell; where he sank, there he fell - dead." Judges 5:27

* * * * *

He paused for a moment to run one hand over the shattered remains of the squat, metallic specimen tank, caressing the sharp edges of the twisted hull almost lovingly. Here had lain Jenova...not in all of her glory, per se, for she had been missing her head for some time...but in state, at least. He supposed that he should be grateful that their son had taken the rest of her as well, for now she was safe, miles underground and protected by an energy barrier, rather than encased in pitiful manmade steel.

But he regretted the distance, all the same. The whispers in his mind were faded and quiet, audible now only because there was the additional bond of her cells floating through his veins. Pure grace and mercy that she'd forethought to tell him to inject a small colony of her cells into his body, for now it was his only direct link to her. Also, he was no longer able to stand all night, basking in the glow from her tank and communing with her...sharing dreams and possibilities and plans, just between the two of them. Glorious union of the mind that surpassed any weak and wailing bond that humans could form, to be snapped in two by any piddling occurrence or emotional moment. Here, as in the basement of the Nibelheim mansion, he had stood in worship and wonder, and received commissions from his Goddess, his Mistress, his One.

Ah yes, and there was yet a task laid out for him, even though She was far away. The ignorant wretches in their tower wished to make of themselves a nuisance to his son and his son's Mother. A blast from a cannon that drew power from the Planet...a pitiful show of defiance from a cluster of puling infants, but even that small show of disrespect would not be allowed. He would stop them, and in the stopping, glorify himself in the firestorm.

What bliss, to die in the service of She who would make his son into a God!

With a final, idle stroke of the empty tank, he turned toward the elevators, that he might begin to make his fateful way to the Sister Ray, but the sound of breaking glass gave him pause. He turned toward the silvery, sparkling sound, but saw no one in the deserted labs. Frowning at the delay, but unwilling that any stranger, any survivor should have strayed into these rooms of all rooms, he walked away from the elevator doors and began to stride through the laboratory, glancing this way and that in search of the noise maker.

His quick search revealed nothing but a stray container, now a collection of broken glass on the floor, some of the pieces still rocking back and forth on their rounded edges. He frowned at the anomaly of a broken container, far from any tabletop or counter from which it might have fallen, and then started as a strident cry of warning rang through his head, but he did not have time to act.

* * * * *

She sprang from behind a bookcase and ran up behind him, her bare feet nearly silent on the smooth floor. He seemed to hear her all the same, for he jerked slightly before she had even reached him, but before he could turn to face her, she was upon him. Her left hand reached about his face to grasp his head, her right arm curved around his neck, and then she brought her arms apart once more. She jerked him about by pulling his head round, and as he turned, the glittering piece of glass in her right hand tore through his neck.

The shard bit deep into her hand, but she was past caring, instead noting with satisfaction all of the damage that she did. Skin, muscle, fat, arteries, and veins all parted beneath her weapon, and then the glass caught in the cartilage of his throat, and was wrenched from her blood-slicked grasp.

The hot crimson fluid flew from his neck, gushing from in between the already slackening fingers that he brought up in startled reflex, and fell on her like a warm rain. His eyes, wide with surprise...surprised to see her, surprised at the sudden gaping openness of his throat, surprised to realize that he was going to die in less than six seconds...found her face, and as she stared back, Lucrecia laughed.

He spoke her name, or attempted to, but all that reached her ears was a rough, "'Cre..." and a thick gurgling noise, and then she watched as he fell dead at her feet, splattering her with yet more blood as he landed heavily in the rapidly spreading pool about him.

As the red lake spread and touched her feet, she suddenly fled the scene, although she was far past caring for any conventions such as law. Just as doggedly as she had fled her cavern and traveled across rivers and fields and mountains and oceans in search of revenge, now she fled it as speedily down stairs, through hallways, into abandoned corridors, across countless catwalks and through myriad doorways, until she found herself suspended by a narrow bridge over a glowing, glittering pool of misty green Life.

The Planet's soul, life, blood this was...mako, energy, Lifestream. From this was all life born, and to this all life returned.

She jumped.

* * * * *

Fingers twitched once, twice, and then suddenly the entire body jerked into life. Hands scrabbled like crabs in the slick bloodpool and legs pistoned a few times, and then he heaved himself up, awkward and unbalanced as any wooden puppet. His head wobbled strangely on its damaged pillar, adding to the unnatural movements of the form as a whole.

Hojo coughed violently, retching up clots of blood mixed with strings of saliva and oily strands of purple-blue matter, and then frowned, rubbing his pained throat with one crimson-stained hand. His probing fingers found the ragged edges of the wound, still only half-closed with throbbing, bruise-colored webbing.

Leaving Her cells to finish their work unmolested by his curiosity, he picked himself off of the floor and began removing his ruined clothes. There were many extra sets of clothing and hundreds of lab coats in the next room, and no one to hinder his changing, but he hurried all the same.

He had work to do.


End file.
